Understanding Storage in Windows Home Server 2011

Although Windows Home Server 2011 comes with many new and useful features—the Dashboard, the Launchpad, improved Mac support, easier remote access, and more—all anyone seems to talk about is what’s not in Windows Home Server 2011. I speak, of course, of Drive Extender, the file system technology that in version 1 of Windows Home Server made disk management supremely simple by offering data redundancy in the form of folder duplication, a seamlessly expandable pool of storage data that could span multiple hard drives, and load balancing.

As I write this just before the launch of Windows Home Server 2011, it’s unclear why Microsoft removed Drive Extender so abruptly, and we may never know the full story. What is clear is that Microsoft is relying on system vendors and other third parties to come up with innovative storage solutions that mimic or surpass what Drive Extender could do, and no doubt there are lots of clever people working on just that.